Please Don’t Vote. It’s Worse than Worthless. There Are Alternatives.

Three and a half years ago I wrote
an essay about why Americans should stop
participating in the presidential election — either as voters, as
supporters of one candidate or another, or as participants in the endless
social media and conversational back-and-forths. In short, that they should pay
as little attention as possible to the election campaign and should revel in
and take pride in their ignorance of the horse race and the candidates and
their “positions.”

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine
posted this on her Facebook wall:

I feel bad because I feel like I should listen to everything they have to say
but, I just had to turn off the Republican Debate. I just couldn’t handle it.
Even while looking at pictures of puppies and kittens.

So I decided I should dust this essay off and polish it up a bit in the hopes
of helping her and other people who feel guilty about ignoring politicians.
This election is shaping up to be the best one in my lifetime not to vote in,
so I hope my essay will ease many unnecessarily troubled consciences.

It’s still 2015, isn’t it? The presidential
election is fifteen months off and the party conventions are still almost a
year away. These days campaign season seems to never end. You’re probably
already being inundated with tweets and status updates and comments and op-ed
pieces forwarded from family members and blog posts and video clips of
indignant pundits — almost all designed to deride one candidate or boost
another.

There are some rare, mature, and sensible ones that urge you to carefully
consider the important issues, resist the distortions of propaganda and the
news cycle, and look at the big picture before you vote. But above all, to
vote! Vote as if it were the most important decision you were going to make
next year.

I hope you will indulge a different point of view. I’m going to urge you not
to vote. Further, I’m going to ask you not to encourage your friends and family
to vote for anyone, or at all. Even better, I’m going to suggest that you
cultivate a studied ignorance of the candidates and their positions so that
even if you were forced at gunpoint into a voting booth next November you
wouldn’t have any idea which lever to pull. And not only that, but I’m going to
tell you how, by (not) doing all these things, you can be of greater service to
your country, your community, your loved ones, and yourself.

There are two main reasons why I expect you to follow this heretical advice.
One of them is utterly rational, logical, and easily-demonstrated: your vote
is unimportant to the outcome of the election, and whether you carefully
consider your vote and cast it wisely or whether you just flip a coin in the
voting booth or whether you instead make other plans entirely, the effect you
have on who becomes president will be the same. It doesn’t matter for whom you
vote in the privacy of the booth, and so there is no reason to become an
informed voter, and indeed no good reason to vote at all.

The second reason requires a little more imagination but amounts to this:
presidential elections are harmful, and they become more harmful the more that
people care about them and the more attention they devote to them. Most
anything else you can imagine doing with your time other than paying attention
to politicians for the next year and change would be more beneficial to you, to
your loved ones, and to your community.

Then there’s the dessert — almost the best reason of all: if you decide now
that you aren’t going to vote in November, you can stop paying attention. You
can let all of the squabbling rattle on without you, and you can ignore the
impassioned partisans and the indignant commercials and the breathless
commentators and your earnest and tireless relative who forwards everything.
You’ll thank me.

Voting is Pointless

Your vote, should you fail to heed my advice and decide to cast one, will make
no difference in the result of the presidential election. If you cast your vote
for the candidate whose stated positions most closely match your views, whose
image is most sympathetic to your self-image, who seems wisest and most
well-advised — or if you devilishly succumb to a whim to do exactly the
opposite — it doesn’t matter, because your vote will not make any difference in
who becomes the president.

This is not because American elections are corrupt and error-prone, though
certainly they are. True enough: because of poor interface design, the ease of
malicious hacking, politically-motivated voter roll manipulation, and other
such reasons, there is only a dim resemblance between the vote tally and the
actual intended preferences of the voters. Also true: your well-considered,
researched, intelligently-selected vote may easily be swamped by the haphazard
votes of dozens of morons or by flipped bits in the slapdash voting machine or
by snafus at the post office. It also cannot be denied that if the vote totals
are by some chance close enough to matter in any important precinct
(e.g. Palm Beach in 2000),
the results will quickly be taken out of the hands of the voters entirely and
left to the chad-wrangling of political operatives or partisan judges.

But these are not the reasons why voting is pointless. Even if none of these
things were true, the sheer size of the electorate makes any individual vote
mathematically worthless. Even if every vote were counted, only once, and
actually represented the real, informed intention of a real, live voter, and
even if every eligible voter were indeed permitted to vote, and even if the
weird electoral college were abolished or replaced with something more
sensible — even then, you would be wasting your time to vote.

Simply as a matter of scale, as the size of the electorate increases, the
likelihood that any one vote will matter quickly, asymptotically approaches
zero. At the current scale, at the width of the finest pen with which we can
draw this asymptote, it is indistinguishable from zero.

But, you may be thinking, although my vote individually may not have
any effect, our votes (you and me, and our right-thinking friends) in
the aggregate just might — if the aggregate is big enough. If it is true that
it is completely irrational and worthless to vote, and if rational people act
on this knowledge, doesn’t that mean that our elections will necessarily be
decided by the opinions of people who are too irrational, mathematically
illiterate, or unwise to refrain from voting? Can we risk that?

The answer to this objection is that, yes, tautologically, to the extent that
our presidential elections are in fact decided by the expressed aggregate will
of the voters, they are decided by the expressed aggregate will of those too
unwise to know not to vote. No, we shouldn’t risk such a crazy thing,
but we cannot change it by voting, because by voting you immediately
become part of the problem you hope to solve.

It’s like looking at a sidewalk 3-card-monte game and saying to yourself that
you’d better throw down a bet, because otherwise that unscrupulous dealer will
be able to successfully con all those unsophisticated people who are playing
without knowing the trick. If you play, you become the sucker.

But aha! Here’s a tough question: “If my vote is so darned worthless, why are
so many people spending so much time and energy and money trying to obtain it?”
This is indeed a nut that needs cracking, but it will have to wait until the
next section.

If participating in the electoral spectacle were merely pointless, I
wouldn’t be writing this screed. Lots of things that people do aren’t really
good for anything, and that’s nobody’s business but their own. However…

Voting is Harmful

If you put the dread judgment of mathematics aside, elections might be worth
getting excited about if they were actually what they sometimes pretend to be:
our way of choosing qualified people to take necessary and important
policy-making and -enacting jobs, in such a way that those people best
represent the considered judgments of the citizenry.

But these parody elections like the one being inflicted on us today are nothing
of the sort.

For one thing, elections like these effectively select some of the worst people
among us by perversely rewarding the sort of charming mendacity and amoral
ruthlessness that characterize sociopaths. If you watch a political debate or
stump speech or what-have-you, you’re watching an extended act of dishonesty.
You’re watching someone whose every word is being chosen (or, more often than
not, has been carefully chosen earlier) to manipulate you. Honesty — that is,
the genuine motivation to inform someone accurately about what they want or
need to know — never enters into it for a second.

I’ve met people like this, and you probably have too — people who seem to think
that the only purpose of speech is to tell self-serving stories that trick
other people into doing what they want — but when we meet them in real life we
warn our friends about them and speculate as to how they became the monsters
they are. But when they get on stage and try to get us to vote for them, many
of us lose all of our good sense.

“Well, that’s the way the game is played,” I sometimes hear. “If you don’t
fight dirty, you aren’t going to win, so even the good ones have to fight
dirty. An honest candidate couldn’t win.” But if you have accidentally (let us
hope) established a political system that excels at elevating psychopaths to
positions of power and authority, maybe the answer is not to hope for a flock
of honorable people who can impersonate psychopaths long enough to climb into
power, but to stop propping up a process that installs psychopaths as your
rulers, and, once these psychopaths have been successfully identified by
their success in the electoral process, to stop giving them so much power
to do evil.

Sometimes people respond to criticisms like this by saying that there is no
point in holding out for an ideal democracy, but that the sorts of imperfect
elections designed by mortal men, of which the American presidential election
is one variety, are better than none at all. Would I rather have a hereditary
monarchy or a communist one-party state?

But these elections aren’t just “imperfect” incarnations of democratic
decision-making — they’re not democratic at all in any important sense, that is
in the sense of being an instance of people ruling themselves rather than
being subjected to the decisions of others. It’s as if your dad promised to
take you to a baseball game and instead took you to a junkyard where nine
mannequins were stood up against a wall wearing baseball caps. “Well, it’s not
an ideal baseball game, I’ll grant you that, but we can’t expect perfection.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Besides, you told me you hate football.
Want a bag of styrofoam popcorn?”

Those who exaggerate the importance of elections (usually as part of their
campaign pitch about how important it is for you to vote, and in a particular
way) also tend to exaggerate the power of office-holders and the abilities (and
propensities) of the politicians who hold office. This has the unfortunate
effect of getting people accustomed to the idea that these offices
ought to have great powers concentrated in them, and ought to be
looked on to solve our problems, create miracles, provide for our needs, and so
forth. This in turn makes the psychopaths in power more dangerous.

These elections also degrade the honesty, decency, and community solidarity of
ordinary people who are induced to participate in them. They turn otherwise
good people into spin doctors who see half of their fellow-citizens as enemies
to be defeated and who annoy the rest of us with their email forwards and
arguments at parties. These elections harm our communities, waste our
resources, and embarrass us in the eyes of posterity. The best way we can
confront them is to refuse to fan the flames or provide fresh fuel.

Earlier I raised the question of why so much money and effort is being spent to
chase down votes that I claimed weren’t worth anything at all. The simple
answer is that your vote is of no worth to you, but it may under some
circumstances have some tiny worth to those who want to harvest it. Let me
explain:

Your presidential vote (assuming your state is even “in play”) may be a tiny
bit important and a tiny bit valuable to vote harvesters — though only as a
fraction of the aggregate votes in your state (this makes intuitive sense). But
to you, your vote is not even worth that fraction (this, people have a
harder time understanding).

It’s kind of the same way that Coke & Pepsi spend an enormous amount of
money, creative talent, and personnel to try to influence people to choose one
of two almost identical products. Imagine how eagerly they would be trying if,
by convincing 50.1% of Americans to choose one or the other, they could force
100% of us to drink nothing but for the next four years. In such a case, your
vote — even your wee little vote — might indeed be worth something for Coke
& Pepsi to pursue in the course of pursuing a larger percentage… but how
much would it be worth it to you to cast that vote? Nothing at all.

blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing
to Add Life

(And as with the campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, the campaigns for president have
little to do with the actual merits, if you can call them that, of the
products. People cast their presidential votes not for the person and policies
that eventually may occupy the office of president, but in a popularity contest
between carefully market-tested candidate/brands. Witness all of the people who
are angry at Obama because he did not behave in office at all like the
president he had successfully convinced them to Hope for in order to win their
votes. What were they voting for? A president or a brand identification?
Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing
to Add Life.)

If you pay attention to this charade, you give it more media market
share — more “eyeballs.” You make the aggregate a little bigger and the
election that much more expensive (if you’re buying it) or profitable (if
you’re selling the tools to win it) — slightly increasing the amount of money,
time, and attention necessary, and thereby also the various harms, including of
course the endless corrupting pursuit of campaign cash by the politicians.

Also, in order to convince yourself to vote, or more specifically to vote
“correctly,” you must tell yourself a story in which your vote is actually
important or influential. This reinforces the illusion that the subjects of the
U.S. government have
meaningful democratic influence over its policies, and therefore this reduces
the chances that you will look honestly at the real state of politics or will
work for genuine change.

When you exaggerate the importance of voting for president — by urging people
to vote one way or another or by making a big deal about anything the
candidates are doing — you reinforce the illusion that voting for the right
thing is anything like doing the right thing. The problems with our
country won’t be solved by what people vote for on their ballots one day in
November every four years, but by what they vote for with their actions on the
1,460 days in-between.

What You Can Do Instead

Well, then, what do I suggest? It is important, isn’t it, who the
president is? We have to do something to make our influence felt, and, unless
you’ve got the sniper chops of a Lee Harvey Oswald, election season is the time
to do it, right? After all, even if the saying is true that “if voting could
change anything, it would be illegal,” isn’t that also true of not voting?

Don’t slip back into superstition! Just because there isn’t an actual way for
citizens to exercise reasonable democratic guidance over their government
doesn’t make the fake ways any less fake. Just because you can’t win the
lottery by crossing your fingers doesn’t mean you should knock-on-wood twice as
hard.

I’ve got a better idea: Every time you feel tempted to click on that headline
about the latest debates, every time you’re tempted to unmute the campaign
commercial or click “play” on that dreadful gaffe posted to YouTube, every time
you find yourself on the verge of forwarding some news about the campaign to
your friends… get up, walk calmly to the bathroom sink, and floss your teeth.

Most people don’t floss their teeth nearly often enough. I know I don’t. But
flossing can prevent painful tooth decay, embarrassing and off-putting bad
breath, infectious disease, and apparently even (through mechanisms still under
investigation) heart disease. By flossing, you practice inexpensive
preventative medicine that will contribute to your better flourishing while at
the same time it reduces the likelihood that you will need expensive medical
care.

Make a disaster preparation kit. Check your smoke detector batteries. Read a
good book. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Any of those things would be better
for you and your community than participating in the Election 2016 foofaraw.
I bet you’ve got some even better ideas.

But please don’t vote. And encourage your friends and loved ones not to vote
as well. Don’t feel like you have to participate in discussing the foibles of
the candidates or comparing their “positions,” and don’t be afraid to be
utterly ignorant of the horse race. Be proud of it! As it is, I couldn’t pick
Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson out of a photo lineup,
but I’d be even happier if I’d never heard their names.

If you decide now that you’re not going to vote and that you’re not going to
encourage other people’s political baloney either, you are immediately freed
from any obligation to follow the campaign trivia. You’ll be happier, more
productive and helpful, and less of an annoyance to your friends and family.
Heave a sigh of relief. Get your “Delete”-clicking finger ready, and start
daydreaming about what you’re going to do with all of your extra time, mental
energy, and social capital.

In the years since I’ve posted (and tweaked and reposted) this argument,
I’ve only seen one good counterargument among all the sputtering and fuming
it’s caused: this one.

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